How about this for a change of pace? Here’s a story about the Marlins not being cheap.

According to Juan C. Rodriguez of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, right-hander Jose Fernandez will make a $635,000 salary this season. The Marlins could have simply renewed his contract for somewhere around the major league minimum salary of $500,000, but they decided to reward him after he won the National League Rookie of the Year Award last year.

It’s not much, but a gesture like that could create some goodwill if the two sides engage in extension talks down the line. Of course, Fernandez is represented by Scott Boras and the Marlins have shown an inclination to trade players once they get expensive, so that could be tough. Fernandez, 21, is under team control through 2018.

Why does everybody think that giving a guy a little bit extra money now is going to engender the kind of goodwill that would provide a substantial discount on his extension? Oh yes, you gave me a couple extra hundred thousand dollars a couple years ago, so I’ll leave tens of millions of dollars on the table for you. Yawn.

Except that no one thinks that. This was a goodwill gesture, a kind of pat on the head, and it’s aimed at making the local Cuban constituency feel wanted and needed. This is how Scrooge McLoria thinks – though I suspect that the local Cuban community, having succeeded so profoundly in cultural and economic terms here, isn’t going to be all that impressed by what, in the financial firmament of MLB, is very much of a gesture at all. Making some serious investment in run producers this past orfseason, instead of pretending to be “all in” with major free agents while collecting has-beens and wannabes off the scrapheap, would have made much more of an impression.

The Marlins do have some great young pitching (even without Jose Fernandez.)

Old Gator - Mar 1, 2014 at 10:47 PM

That infield lineup could change, though not necessarily for the better (I mean, who would the Feesh get?), if any of these guys crashes and burns or pops a sprocket this spring.

The outfield is uncertain as well: the Iron Giant is ensconced in right, and the other two spots are going to be a catfight between Marisnick, Yelich and Ozuna. For center, I hope that Ozuna finds his batting consistency because defensively, he and the Giant have a pair of howitzers and between them. It would be an orgy of assists, and they’d intimidate the hooves off’n anyone thinking about taking an extra base.

quintjs - Mar 1, 2014 at 5:47 PM

And here I just assumed they wanted him to get more expensive more quickly, so thery can do their favourite activity, trading players for cheaper and less talented players.

Whereas the extra $135G is a nicer gesture than you might expect from the Feesh front orifice, they’ve already got a bad public relations problem with their other “face,” the Iron Giant, about whom it is well known that he’s not happy with the organization (and who has all but disappeared from their PR materials so far this year, replaced by El Keed). Even so, this raise is a pretty piddling show of goodwill by an impecunious management that at least proves it has a collective brain stem in acknowledging that the young peetcher is virtually its only high visibility draw at the moment. The Iron Giant, on the other hand, has been cagey about extension talks – as has the team’s new administration – and you can bet that if something positive doesn’t jell in that department by the time they break camp, the main talk about the Feesh between now and July will be trade talk. The Giant had a sub-par year last season and to elbow his way back into promotional viability he’s at least going to need to prove he’s finally got a grip on the strike zone, stop chasing peetches low and away, launch some mars missions and drive in some runs to open the season.

The Feesh have a chance to haul their tailfins out of the friction layer this season because of their impressive young rotation and boolpen, but only if the Iron Giant comes around and gets some guys on base to punch across. Even so, I still don’t see any serious run production improvement in this roster without the sophomores Ozuna, Marisnick and Yelich maturing a little and finding ways to get on base and help drive in runs. I’ll be watching them carefully this month for some signs that this could happen, with my fingers painfully crossed.

I agree that that’s possible, which is why I’m leaving open the possibility that they can haul themselves into fourth place this season, but I don’t see them climbing over the Feelies and I certainly don’t see them scrabbling with the Braves and Gnats. So many things need to go right in the areas beyond the pitching rubber and behind the plate, where I feel confident about what they’ve got, that it’s intimidating to optimism.

Yeah, and maybe some day someone will explain to me why, with the personal mandate all but universal otherwise, those idiot democrats had to single out small business owners to shoulder the burden of paying for coverage on which congress failed to impose cost controls? Why not just continue to give businessowners the option of either paying for or contributing to health insurance, in return for some kind of tax credit to offset their accounting expenses for doing so, and extend a tax credit to offset its cost of the premium to workers whose employers don’t want to do that? Most of all, why on Earth involve the same price- and profit-gouging insurance companies in the mandate without firmly established and clearly delineated mandates for cost, coverage and network controls? Far and away the biggest problem with the ACA is that the insurance company “advisors” and clerks don’t have any idea of what they’re doing or what the rules really are. Prices are still all over the place. This is just one of many, many things wrong with this Rube Goldberg contraption of a “healthcare reform.” This should have been a tax-supported single payer system, period – instead, it’s just a new swimming pool full of the same damned sharks.

historiophiliac - Mar 2, 2014 at 1:31 PM

Sooooo, wrong Gator?

Old Gator - Mar 2, 2014 at 2:58 PM

Nope, that’s just cousin Al back in the bookkeeper’s orifice. We don’t talk to that side of the family. They were farm raised.

historiophiliac - Mar 2, 2014 at 3:06 PM

Funny. I remain amazed that we haven’t had more of a push *for* single-payer from the business community. It has to be the only instance where Wal Mart has not gotten it’s way. It does seriously help businesses not to have to be responsible for providing insurance in our country. They can focus on other things instead. (Of course, we won’t all be tied to our jobs as much either.)

I always felt like welfare capitalism gets the short-shrift in histories. I stumbled onto it as a student and make a point of going over it with my classes now. People would think differently about our healthcare system if they knew how it came about.